What I Did On My Holidays

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked, as Clare enlarged the photograph to its maximum size on the screen. ‘Are you trying to torture me?’

  Placing her elbow on the table to steady her, Clare held the camera lens of her iPhone very close to the laptop screen and took a picture. She looked at the results and shook her head. She turned off my desklight, which was shining on the screen and causing a reflection, and tried another shot. She closed the bedroom door so that there was no reflection from the hallway either. She turned off the bedroom light. She held the camera lens of her phone so close to the screen it was almost touching. Click.

  At last. This time she grinned at her handiwork. She passed the iPhone to me. ‘There we are, sis. Our very own sea view, taken from our hotel bedroom window.’

  I looked at the photograph on Clare’s phone with some astonishment. Clare really hadn’t done a bad job. She had taken the photograph from such close proximity that it really did look as though she had just held her phone out of the bedroom window and filled the screen with a real, live view.

  ‘That’s great, but it’s a little bit grainy and—’

  ‘It’s perfect. Now let’s send it to Evan.’

  ‘No. You can’t. He’ll guess . . .’

  ‘Guess what?’

  ‘That it’s not a real photograph.’

  ‘He won’t know it’s not real. You know what he’s like. He’ll glance at it for all of ten seconds and go back to surfing comparison sites for savings on our gas bill. We should send it to Mum too. You know it will put her mind at rest to know we’re in such a lovely place. It does look lovely, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It should do. It’s the best hotel on the island. That’s why I chose it.’

  ‘Such a shame. Will you get your money back? You could always go there for real later on.’

  ‘I don’t think so. We were a late cancellation. The hotel rules are that we have to pay full price. And I don’t think there’s any provision in my travel insurance for being dumped the night before my fortnight off.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Clare. ‘You’d have been far better off if he’d been run over by a bus. I’m pretty sure they pay out if your travelling companion is dead.’

  That wasn’t much consolation. Tears prickled my eyes. Looking at that picture online had reminded me all over again what I was missing. I closed the window down so I wouldn’t have to look at those sunny pictures any more. Clare put her arm round my shoulder.

  ‘There will be other summer holidays,’ she said. ‘I promise. But for now, as far as Evan and Mum are concerned, here is the view.’

  ‘Don’t send it, Clare,’ I begged her. ‘This is going to end in trouble.’

  Too late. She’d already pressed ‘send’.

  I felt especially guilty when Mum texted back to say how wonderful the hotel looked and how proud she was that her two little girls were on holiday together, looking after each other just as she had always hoped they would. It made her feel so much happier to know that I wasn’t on my own.

  ‘See,’ said Clare. ‘She’s convinced that we’re in Majorca.’

  ‘She was convinced that John Barrowman was straight . . . I bet she was wearing the wrong glasses,’ I said.

  But Evan, too, seemed to be happy to take the photograph of the ‘view from our hotel’ at face value. He texted to say he was very jealous of Clare being out there in the sun while he was hard at work, saving money for their wedding, by spending his Saturday afternoon sanding down the paintwork on the banisters all by himself. That last comment made a small cloud pass across Clare’s face.

  ‘He’s trying to make me feel bad,’ she complained.

  ‘Do you think so? I don’t think that was his intention.’

  ‘I know he’s upset that I’m spending money on a holiday when we’ve been saying all along that we wouldn’t go on holiday until our honeymoon.’

  ‘Then he’ll be pleased when he eventually finds out that you didn’t go anywhere at all and the money is still in your Egg account,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Clare, brightening at the idea. ‘I thought I might use it to buy a pair of Jimmy Choos for the wedding, given that as far as he’s concerned it’s already gone. Right?’

  ‘I like your thinking,’ I told her.

  ‘I think you should send this photo to the girls at work too,’ said Clare then.

  ‘No. That’s too risky.’

  ‘Mum didn’t twig. Neither did Evan. Why should Hannah and Alison be any different?’

  ‘Because they are different. Believe me. Unfortunately for Mum and Evan, they have a great deal of trust in you and me. They wouldn’t think for a moment that the photo might be fake, but Hannah has actually been to the Hotel Mirabossa, remember? I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if she recognised that shot from their website.’

  ‘She won’t make the connection. It won’t even cross her mind. Why would it?’

  This time I didn’t let Clare persuade me.

  ‘Hannah and Alison don’t need a picture,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘OK,’ said Clare. ‘But they will need some sort of update soon. Something with a bit of colour. In the meantime, what are we going to do today?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘Read some books?’

  But Clare wasn’t asking whether we were going to watch an entire boxed set of Glee or just read our holiday paperbacks. The balcony-view picture had sparked off a whole new chain of thought. She meant, what were we going to do that day for the purposes of entertaining the people who really believed we were away?

  To more effectively keep our secret for the whole week, Clare proposed that we drop small realistic hints about our holiday activities via text, Facebook and Twitter. We didn’t have to go into any great detail, but Clare thought it would help if we threw in some place names – just enough to add some authenticity without raising suspicions. With that in mind, she went online again and scanned the Majorcan tourist board’s website for ideas that would add fuel to our fiction.

  ‘We should definitely visit Palma,’ Clare read aloud. ‘The cathedral is a fourteenth-century masterpiece. There are wonderful restaurants in the old town that really should not be missed.’

  ‘OK.’

  A visit to the cathedral seemed easy enough to fake. There was plenty of information online and it wasn’t long before Clare had lifted a picture from the tourism website. She zoomed in on a detail of masonry.

  ‘Arty, huh?’

  I had to agree. It looked very convincing.

  ‘The Caves of Drach in Porto Cristo are unmissable,’ she told me a little later.

  I knew that. They had been on the itinerary I planned for me and Callum. ‘We’ll pretend to go there on Monday,’ I said. ‘That’s the day the hotel runs a coach trip.’

  ‘OK,’ said Clare. ‘Let’s do this properly.’ She opened up a spreadsheet on Excel and divided it into the days that remained of our holiday. ‘This will make it easier for us to keep our story straight when we get back to the real world.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Let’s make tomorrow a pool day.’

  ‘You’re on.’

  ‘And there’s a market in the old town of Pollensa on a Saturday afternoon,’ said Clare. ‘Shall we go there right now? We should buy some souvenirs. Presents for Mum and Evan.’

  ‘We can’t pretend we’ve bought presents. What happens when we get back empty-handed?’ I asked, making virtual speech marks around the words ‘get back’.

  ‘Ah. I’ve already thought of that. You’ll leave our gifts in the overhead locker on the plane,’ she suggested in an echo of the Disney story she’d told all those years before, when she claimed that she’d left Mickey’s gift to her on the plane so that she wouldn’t have to show it to her classmates. ‘Mum and Evan will just have to believe we bought them something. It’s the thought that counts after all.’

  ‘Why do I have to be the one who leaves stuff in
the overhead locker?’

  ‘Because the stress of the break-up has made you forgetful?’ Clare suggested.

  ‘You’re the forgetful one,’ I reminded her. ‘Remember that time you left the dog tied up outside the supermarket when Mum sent you to get some bread?’

  ‘We hadn’t had him long. And Mum had given me such a long shopping list. Not just bread. Besides, it took the rest of you until bedtime to realise he was missing too.’

  ‘OK. What about the time you left my denim jacket on a bus?’

  ‘I knew you’d bring that up. I think I’ve already apologised a thousand times. It was just a denim jacket.’

  ‘That was the first thing I ever bought with my Saturday-job money.’

  ‘It didn’t suit you.’

  ‘Oh, that makes it all right. And then—’

  ‘Now you’re going to mention the time I forgot to watch the chip pan.’

  ‘You set the kitchen on fire.’

  ‘I put the fire out. There was just a bit of smoke. Even Mum has forgiven me by now, almost twenty years after the event. Thank God for my Brownie home-safety badge.’

  ‘But you think I’m the forgetful one?’

  ‘OK, OK. I don’t think you’re the forgetful one. I was only trying to help. It was just a suggestion. A detail to make our coming back with no presents less suspicious. Do you want to convince Callum you’re on holiday without him or not?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll try your plan. But only if you are the one to leave the presents in the overhead locker.’

  ‘If it makes you feel better,’ said Clare.

  ‘It does.’

  So having lunched on distinctly un-Mediterranean fare of individual chicken and mushroom pies, we ‘went to the market’ and bought a new leather purse for Mum and a keyring for Dad. Clare texted Evan to ask if he would like a new wallet. Evan texted back that there was no point her spending money on a new wallet if Evan didn’t have money to put in it. They were supposed to be saving for the wedding, remember?

  ‘As if I could forget,’ Clare sighed. ‘Still, that’s one less present to cart back to the airport. And for me to leave in the plane . . .’

  After the market, Clare sank into an armchair and declared herself to be ‘by the pool’ for the rest of the afternoon. I should only interrupt her if I came bearing cocktails. I was not going to make her a cocktail, I told her. Not before six o’clock. Instead, I spent a short while Googling natural methods of dealing with rodents – apparently, having seen one mouse meant that I was harbouring its brothers and sisters by the thousand. I ordered a couple of those sticky boxes that seemed to be the most humane method of dealing with them. It only struck me afterwards, as I was cleaning my silver jewellery with bicarbonate of soda (another job long overdue), that I would have to deal with the mice once they’d got themselves stuck by the paws. It wasn’t a very nice thought. Didn’t they bite?

  When I took her a cup of tea – ‘Not quite a cocktail, but you can’t get tea like this in Majorca’ – Clare told me she’d once read that mice were quite psychic and you could often make them leave a house just by asking them nicely to move next door. It didn’t surprise me at all that Clare believed you could reason with a rodent. For quite some time in her twenties she thought she had been Lady Jane Grey in a past life. If only we could have asked Evan what the best solution was. Not only would he have known, he would probably have insisted on taking over the execution of it, saving me the onerous task altogether. Clare didn’t know how lucky she was to have a fiancé who would do that sort of thing. Barring a fiancé of my own, or even a boyfriend, I made up my mind to call Rentokil when I ‘got back’ to my flat.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Clare was very pleased with her plan to check out what was happening in Majorca online before feeding the information back to our friends and relations. We had texted Mum ‘from the market’. A few hours later, Mum had tweeted that she was looking forward to seeing what we’d bought. Hannah – who I would have thought had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon – tweeted in response that she had bought a fabulous leather doorstop in the shape of a donkey. Mum texted me to ask if I could find a donkey for her. She would reimburse me. Clare said I should respond, ‘No way, on the grounds of taste.’

  Minutes later, Hannah texted saying she wondered whether I might find a doorstop donkey for her too.

  ‘It would be great to have a matching pair.’

  ‘They’ve sold out,’ I responded. ‘Only elephants left.’

  ‘Not very Spanish,’ was Hannah’s response.

  ‘Wasn’t Hannibal Spanish?’ asked Clare. ‘Say that.’

  ‘Clare,’ I said, ‘we should just leave it. I think the level of detail we’re putting into our fake break is going to bring us more hassle.’

  ‘But you must at least be reassured that people seem convinced so far?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I admitted. I just wasn’t as sure as Clare seemed to be that people were really that gullible or that they would remain so after nearly a week of our texts.

  That evening, we looked at the list of bars and clubs that Hannah had given me and chose a place called Palacio Blanco, the White Palace, to be the setting for our first virtual evening out. To make our lives easier, we checked that this particular place had a website. Thankfully, it did. Even more usefully, the website had a webcam feature, which streamed live action from the bar itself. At seven thirty in the evening, it wasn’t exactly kicking, but Clare and I were able to compose a text to Hannah in which I accurately described the red-and-black frilly shirts of the band who were setting up for the night.

  ‘I remember that band,’ Hannah texted back. ‘Ask them to play “You’re Beautiful” for me.’

  After pretending to barf at the thought of James Blunt’s ubiquitous song, we assured her that we would.

  ‘Ask them if they remember me and my fiancé.’

  I texted Hannah to say that the band leader had told us he could never forget her or her long, blond hair. That was Clare’s idea. She thought a bit of flattery might make Hannah more inclined to keep feeding the good news to Callum and make her less likely to question its veracity.

  Anyway, we left the Palacio Blanco webpage open so that we could listen to the music while we cooked our supper, which was a very passable paella. It turned out that there was some saffron in the back of one of my cupboards. I couldn’t remember ever having bought it, but it did the job with some frozen prawns that were just within their use-by date.

  ‘At least if I text Evan to say we’ve had paella, I won’t be lying,’ Clare pointed out.

  After dinner, I played solitaire on the coffee table and Clare knitted. How she had managed to squeeze half a fisherman’s jumper and three balls of wool into her case along with the rest of her worldly goods, I really don’t know. She asked me to turn the music up and clicked her needles in time. And at ten o’clock – eleven o’clock Majorcan time – the band at the Palacio Blanco did play James Blunt’s biggest hit. They probably played it at around that time every night, but we texted Hannah at once and told her they had played it just for her. The band’s guitarist remembered her and Mike well, we assured her.

  ‘You know,’ said Clare, ‘I’m really starting to chill out. Are you starting to chill out yet? Another cosmopolitan?’

  While I had discovered a thousand small household tasks I’d never got round to, Clare had discovered a thousand things to do with the assorted bottles of spirits in the cupboard under the stairs, which were all left over from the flat-warming party I’d held three years before. I let her make me one more cosmo and then another and by eleven o’clock in the evening we were actually dancing. The band at the Palacio had knocked off for the evening and a DJ was spinning tunes guaranteed to make you want to get off your chair. We watched in delight as the entire female contingent of the bar’s clientele got to their feet for ‘I Will Survive’.

  ‘Seems apt,’ Clare had said. ‘We should dance as well.’ She pulle
d me from the cushions.

  Exhausted by our whirling round, Clare and I collapsed onto the sofa with the laptop balanced on our knees and watched the action at that faraway club on the webcam.

  ‘Isn’t it strange,’ said Clare, ‘to think of all that dancing and laughing going on over there in Majorca and we’re watching it as it happens. It’s almost like being there.’

  ‘Almost, but not quite.’ I smiled sadly. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You can’t get a decent cup of tea in Majorca,’ Clare and I chorused.

  ‘Callum really is an idiot,’ said Clare as I handed her a milky Earl Grey. ‘Not only because he’s missing out on all that fun in Majorca, but because he’s missing out on being with you. You really are the best girl in the world, and I’m not just saying that because you’re my sister. In fact, if you think about it, it probably means more because you are my sister, since sisters are far more critical of each other than ordinary friends.’

  Clare was right about that. God knows we had been incredibly critical of each other in the past.

  ‘Do you think I’ll get him back by doing this?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sophie, I don’t think the question is whether or not you’ll get Callum back,’ she said. ‘Guys like him always come back eventually. They hate to let anyone go for good.’

  That was true of Callum. I had been slightly disconcerted when he told me that all his ex-girlfriends still sent him birthday greetings. Was it because they couldn’t let him go, or was it actually the other way round?

  ‘I think the real question is whether you truly want him back anyway. Look.’ She pulled me closer to the screen. ‘Look at all those people out there at the Palacio Blanco. Look at all those single blokes hoping to meet a single girl. You could have your pick of them.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I know so. Seriously, Sophie. Perhaps you should use this break, if it really is a break, to think about what you really want. Callum is good-looking, for sure. From time to time, he’s quite funny. But what else is there to him? Is he kind? I don’t think it was especially kind to dump you before your holiday. Is he generous? When the looks are gone, will you still find him quite so interesting?’